When Leonard Bernstein was asked by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis to compose the inaugural work for the opening of The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., he wrote: “The Mass is also an extremely dramatic event in itself—it even suggests a theater work.” Premiered on September 8, 1971, with additional words by Stephen Schwartz of
Godspell fame, Mass is a remarkable, visionary work with a kaleidoscope of musical styles that touches on themes of political protest, existential crisis and religious faith lost and found.

…the premiere of Leonard Bernstein’s Mass was one of the most controversial of all music debuts. Audience members rushed to carp (it was “derivative, attitudinising drivel” according to the prominent critic John Simon), or clap, with the Washington Post’s Paul Hume calling it “the greatest music Bernstein has written”. To his dying day Bernstein himself felt it to be among the most important things he had done (it’s worth recalling again his reaction to Gramophone critic Edward Seckerson’s suggestion to him that the Mass was “seminal”—“A critic’s word,” he replied, “but I might just kiss you on the lips for saying it!”). Now public opinion has caught up with his own…and Marin Alsop has had a great deal to do with that.

As one of Bernstein’s last students, Alsop has tirelessly evangelised for this work. She understands it better than almost anyone, telling Seckerson in this magazine last year, “What’s interesting about Mass is just how prophetic it’s turned out to be. All those boundaries between genres, between different styles of music—they’re gone.” As it happened, Alsop’s long-awaited recording of the piece was pipped to the post by another, also fine, recording from Chandos conducted by Kristjan Järvi. But it is the Alsop on Naxos, with her fine Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, which to my mind shows the greater understanding of its myriad styles and undergoes the more convincing and coherent dramatic arc. And she is also blessed with a riveting performer in the central role of the Celebrant—the aptly named Jubilant Sykes. He throws himself into the performance heart, soul and throat (there are times indeed when one fears for his vocal health, such is his no-holds-barred level of commitment).

So we finally have a worthy successor to Bernstein’s own recording. “[Alsop creates] a dramatic slipstream that is powered relentlessly onwards by the awkward discontinuities and jagged narrative…go tell it on the mountain”, wrote Philip Clark in his review. Power—emotional, musical—is the word.

All in all, I can’t imagine a more resplendent performance than the Alsop/Baltimore, and the audio is also state-of-the art, with tremendous dynamic range, majestic bass, great transparency, and wonderful three-dimensionality.

It’s always a pleasure to find a new CD that I can wholeheartedly endorse, and here we have one that is indispensable: Marin Alsop’s recording of Leonard Bernstein’s Mass. Bernstein’s so-called “Theatre Piece for Singers, Players and Dancers” purposely crossed genres, as a result of which it has always resided somewhere outside the musical theatre classification. And as a result of which, many fans of musical theatre—and fans of Bernstein as well—have more or less overlooked it. Imagine, another score to keep on the shelf alongside West Side Story and Candide—and many Bernstein fans don’t know it? That has been the fate of Mass, alas; Bernstein’s excellent 1971 recording of the score has always been around, more or less, but usually grouped with his symphonic work and relatively undiscovered by Broadwayites. Here we have a sparkling new two-disc recording, available from the relatively low-priced Naxos label. No excuses, please; if you consider yourself a fan of Bernstein and don’t know Mass, now is the time to discover it. And if you know and enjoy your Mass, you’ll no doubt be thrilled by this new recording.

Mass, of course, is the piece that was commissioned by Jacqueline Onassis in 1966 for the opening of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC. The grand premiere at the Opera House on Sept. 8, 1971, just across the street from the Watergate, arrived under storm clouds; Bernstein’s pop-rock, anti-war version of a Catholic mass contained elements seemingly designed to offend anyone over 30 who wasn’t exceedingly liberal. Certainly, the President who inherited it—Mr Nixon—must have seen it as an enormous stick poked in his eye (although he apparently stayed away from the 12-performance engagement). “O you people of power, your hour is now, you may plan to rule forever, but you never do somehow”; this might have been seen as a direct joust in those pre-Watergate days. Mass, which was directed by Gordon Davidson and choreographed by Alvin Ailey, then moved on to a three-week stint at the Metropolitan Opera House. Too big for a Broadway theatre, with almost 250 performers and musicians, but not exactly welcome in higher-brow environs. That turned out to be the fate of the piece.

Marin Alsop, music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, knows Bernstein well; a protégé of the master, she has had considerable success with his work. As a major keeper of the flame, she undertook a grand concert version of Mass last October (her fifth time conducting the piece). This traveled to Carnegie Hall as part of last fall’s Bernstein Festival; the performance on Oct. 24 was decidedly a highlight of my entire theatregoing season.

Ms Alsop does a phenomenal job; she has clearly studied Bernstein’s recording, and effortlessly inhabits the score. But she enhances the piece; certain tempos armore....

After his outrageously dynamic 11-year tenure at the New York Philharmonic, during which time he danced from the podium into the telesphere as America’s most beloved music teacher, Leonard Bernstein was anxious to get back to the business of composing. Best known for his Broadway masterpiece West Side Story, he had only produced two works during his legendary leadership from 1958 to 1969: the “Kaddish” Symphony and Chichester Psalms.

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis gave Bernstein an opportunity to get back on the creative track, big time, with an irresistible commission: to compose the inaugural piece for the opening of the newly constructed Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. This was right up his alley. Bernstein wrote: “I’ve always wanted to compose a service of one sort or another, and I toyed with ecumenical services that would combine elements from various religions and sects, of ancient or tribal beliefs, but it never all came together in my mind until Jacqueline Onassis asked me to write a piece dedicated to her late husband…The Mass is also an extremely dramatic event in itself—it even suggests a theater work.”

Bernstein was the quintessential theatrical composer—he even admitted once that even his concert works had a “theatrical core”—and ran with the idea like no other could. So he took the centuries-old, musico-religious ritual, the Roman Catholic liturgy, and dragged it, kicking and screaming into the 20th century, transforming it into a battleground about the contemporary crisis in faith. He called it Mass: ATheatre Piece for Singers, Players and Dancers. It had its premiere on September 8, 1971. It is a visionary period piece that gains more relevance as time goes on.

Born of the same Zeitgeist that produced Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar, Bernstein’s singularly explosive work, featuring everything from bongos to kazoos, outdid the eclecticism of West Side Story and Candide, while continuing the religious outcries expressed in his “Jeremiah” Symphony and the “Kaddish.” He was thinking bigger than ever. His zany Mass, mixing sacred and secular texts in wacky and original ways, would be a kind of “Symphony of a Thousand” of the Vietnam Era—to invoke the great piece of his hero, Gustav Mahler. It was also his War Requiem, his CarminaBurana, his Symphony of Psalms.

He had about three years to put it together. But six months before the scheduled premiere, Bernstein was in a slight panic because he was in no way close to finished. The born performer in him had not given up his globe-trotting baton, and he was also spending precious creative time working on a film score for Franco Zeffirelli’s Brother Sun, Sister Moon, a “flower power” retelling of the life of St Francis.

Desperate for a collaborator, he tapped his sister Shirley, a playwright agent, who suggested one of her clients, the young, hip Stephen Schwartz, freshly famous for the hit musical based on the life of Christ, Godspell. He was, literally, a godsend, and the two hit it off, working at a delirious pace to make the deadline.

What they concocted was a riveting drama within the framework of the religious service that reflected the cultural malaise going on in America, if not the world, in the early 1970s. The spine of the piece was the standard Roman Catholic liturgical sequence: the Kyrie–Gloria–Credo–Sanctus/Benedictus–Agnus Dei. They amplified and complicated the form by inserting daring “tropes” and serious “meditations” which provided a kind of Talmudic commentary, questioning and challenging the handed-down passages of the service, usually recited without reflection.

Mass weaves within this structure the story of the Celebrant and his “congregation”—which Bernstein calls “street people” made up of singer-dancers—who grow increasingly disillusioned, cynical and exasperated with authority, divine and human. The Celebrant, also plagued with doubt and unable to play an authority figure, has a nervous/spiritual breakdown and commits a blasphemous act by hurling down the holy chalice. Yet this apparent sacrilege leads him back to the simple faith expressed at the beginning of this piece in the glorious A Simple Song.

What is remarkable about this most catholic of Catholic Masses is that despite the kaleidoscopic jumble of styles—blues, rock, pop, Broadway, Middle Eastern dance, symphonic, marching band, contemporary avant-garde atonality, brutism, solemn hymn, dissonant counterpoint, quasi-medieval melismas—Mass holds together as a unified composition. It is not a messy mish-mash, even with the bongos and kazoos.

The opening, three-note Kyrie motif, for instance, reappears in different guises throughout the piece, from haunting oboe and flute “epiphany” solos, to electric guitar riffs. The tritone interval (the augmented fourth), known as the “devil in music,” also runs throughout the piece (as it does in West Side Story). On one hand, it can signify doubt, as in the “I Don’t Know” trope; the tritone is also manifested prominently in the Lydian church mode, which Bernstein cleverly employs in his most tender passages to signify innocence, sung by the boys choir, as in the Sanctus. There is plenty of Bernstein’s signature bouncy lilt of alternating meters.

Mass also features Bernstein’s first use of the rock idiom. Anytime there is some sort of protest, the composer pulls out the electric guitars and “rock” organ (as opposed to the church organ, also used in the piece), appropriately given rock’s association with rage and revolution. And there is plenty of protest and unrest in the piece.

For instance, in the Credo—which means “I believe” in Latin, and is the central tenet expressing belief in one God—the Latin text is dutifully sung in dispassionate, almost machine-like, automatic fashion by a choir on a pre-recorded tape. Right after, a “live” rock band kicks in singing lyrics such as “and then aplaster god like you has the gall to tell me what to do.” That is followed by the trope, “I believe in God / butdoes God believe in me? I’ll believe in any god / If anygod there be.”

The crisis comes to a crescendo in Dona nobispacem, when the street people defiantly demand peace. Even more in-your-face lyrics are spewed forth, “We’renot down on our knees / We’re not praying,” and later, “We’re fed up with your heavenly silence.” At the time of the original performance this also resonated politically with the anti-war movement in Vietnam. (Remember, Bernstein was a diehard liberal who threw a fund-raising party for the Black Panthers in his Park Avenue apartment in 1970.)

Famous pop icon Paul Simon donated a brilliant quatrain, “Half the people are stoned / and the other halfare waiting for the next election / Half the people aredrowned / and the other half are swimming in the wrongdirection” which sums up the lethargy and confusion of a generation. In the mocking “God Said” section, there are lyrics such as “God said that sex should repulse /unless it leads to results / and so we crowd the world /full of consenting adults / And it was good…”

But his Mass is not all groovy counterculture and atheistic rage. Quite the opposite, in spite of the disarming honesty, doubt and indignation. If you listen more carefully, Bernstein is constructing a kind of musical theology. He is making a deeply personal statement about getting lost and finding faith again—the Gospel According to Lenny, you might say.

The fantastic, unforgettable opening of Mass establishes Bernstein’s method and way of thinking. The Kyrie is prerecorded and played in a darkened auditorium, during which different voices and percussion slam up against each other in different keys and tempi. The cacophony is brought to an abrupt, surprising halt with simple open fifths in G major. Thus begins A Simple Song (which is not so simple, and was transplanted from the cancelled score for Zeffirelli’s St Francis film) that introduces the central figure of the Celebrant with guitar in hand. His joyous and uplifting “laudas” soar to the heavens.

That simple song comes back at the end of Mass, against all odds. The mounting chaos of Dona nobispacem, which finishes with a kind of volcanic jam session, drives the once-content Celebrant to frustration if not madness. He impulsively smashes the holy sacraments, but notices that the spilled wine resembles real blood. “Look, isn’t that odd” he sings in this riveting “Fraction” stretch. His agitated, atonal melody is actually quoting and recontextualizing the quasitwelve tone row found in the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

The first time the Beethoven is heard is way back in the first half during Meditation No. 2. Here, Bernstein creates a menacing theme and variations out of Beethoven’s remarkable 11-note sequence. It is important to the overall structure and meaning of Bernstein’s conception.

The clue to this might be found in what Bernstein wrote two years after the premiere of Mass as part of his Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard University, which were televised: “And what about the Finale of Beethoven’s Ninth—that sudden awestruck moment of recognizing the Divine Presence?…Beethoven suspends all tonal harmony, leaving only harmonic implications; that’s what makes it so suddenly awesome, unrooted in earth, extra-terrestrial—so that when earthly harmony does return the incandescent A major triad does indeed cry ‘Brüder!’—Universal brothers, all emerging together from that non-earthly Divinity.”

That startling, enlightening juxtaposition is certainly the model for the opening of Mass, reborn near the end of the searing, soul-searching journey. After the Celebrant’s tormented, tour de force aria during which bits and pieces of what has preceded is recalled (just like those memory quotes in Beethoven’s finale), he is led back to the opening simple song (redubbed “secret song”), intoned by a solo boy soprano, whose angelic voice is the sound of innocence. The Celebrant, a broken man, finds his faith again through this untarnished simplicity, singing in moving unison with the boy.

This is key. That is why Bernstein refused to cut Meditation No. 2, strongly suggested by the show’s original director, Gordon Davidson, and his advisor, Schuyler Chapin, because they thought the show was too long. Bernstein did not budge in the end because that long-range connection had to be maintained.

But even more fundamental than Bernstein’s inspired appropriation of Beethoven is the subtle argument made in Mass that belief in music is a kind of proof of the soul, which strongly suggests a divine presence. In the Credo, the angry rocker gives up on a seemingly absent God, so redirects his belief to the one thing he knows exists: “I believe in F Sharp / I believe inG.” What seems like cutesy self-referentiality actually has deeper implications for Bernstein.

In the Sanctus, the Celebrant picks up on this idea, by drawing clever if goofy connections between solfege syllables and their more meaningful homonyms: “Mialone is only me. But me with sol. Me with soul. Means asong is beginning. Is beginning to grow / Take wing andrise up singing / From me and my soul.” The music has that wistful yearning that is the hallmark of Bernstein’s style.

In the end, if music originates in the soul and the soul originates with God, then music is as close a proof as we are going to get. Thus Bernstein and his theatrical double, the Celebrant, are led back to God through their belief in music, great mystery and miracle at the center of this radical, revelatory liturgy.

Why choose ClassicsOnline?ClassicsOnline is your source for classical music new releases, rare catalog, historical recordings and exclusive bargains. Our vast classical music catalog has over 1 Million tracks from more than 50,000 albums available in DRM-free MP3 (320kbps) and FLAC (lossless format). More than 500 new albums are added each month, all of which are carefully indexed, and searchable by Composer, Artist, Work and Label. Membership is free, and registration includes 5 free tracks for download. Get a free track every week and gain access to exclusive classical deals when you subscribe to our newsletter. ClassicsOnline was honored in 2010 as the Best Classical Download Site by the MIDEM Classical Awards Jury.

Some titles may not be available in all countries because of possible copyright or licensing restrictions.